The Mississippi state plane, a zippy Cessna Citation with a capacity of 12, is a model favored by corporate executives and the wealthy, and its principal passenger, Gov. Haley Barbour, might easily be mistaken for one of them when he arrives with a small entourage at airports in Washington, Las Vegas or New York, a car and driver waiting there at their disposal.

Barbour has traveled extensively on the jet, brushing off suggestions from Mississippi Democrats that he give it up in favor of a more modest propeller plane for his travel. The trips, according to a POLITICO review of the Cessna’s flight manifest since 2007, have mixed state business with both pleasure and national politics.

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VIDEO: Barbour on GOP wave

POLITICO 44

Some of Barbour’s travel may well have been worth it to Mississippi, a state that is heavily dependent on federal funds. But much of the time, he has used the plane to go to fundraisers for himself and other Republican candidates and committees, to football games and to at least one boxing match — travel that has a less obvious connection to what Barbour, a former top lobbyist in Washington, has cast as his lobbying on behalf of his state.

The flight logs obtained by POLITICO indicate that Mississippi has spent more than $500,000 over the past three years on Barbour's air travel. That total does not include security and other logistical costs associated with his trips. And through a quirk in Mississippi law, whenever the governor is out of state, Mississippi must pay the lieutenant governor a salary differential as acting governor.

Barbour has reimbursed the state for a handful of flights, but he has more often scheduled obscure official business to coincide with the business of politics, according to the manifest and logs, which were obtained from the Mississippi Department of Finance and Administration under a Mississippi Public Records Act request by a Democrat who has worked in the state, who provided them to POLITICO.

Critics say the flights suggest that Barbour has continued to live the lifestyle of a highflying lobbyist as he's slashed his state's budget for government services across the board since taking office in 2004.

"All he has to do is meet with one congressman or senator for five minutes, and he can say that he's on official business," complained Mississippi Democratic state Rep. Johnny Stringer, who introduced the bill in the state Legislature to sell the Cessna.

Dan Turner, a spokesman for Barbour, defended the travels as vital to the state’s economy. "Gov. Barbour is an effective marketing tool in a state that really needs it," he said in an e-mail. "In other states, people don't necessarily appreciate the idea of a governor being so outgoing about promoting the state, whether it's in Congress or in boardrooms."

"His traveling doesn't bother me," said state Rep. George Flaggs, a Democrat who has been critical of the governor's recent budget proposals. "I know that the governor may or may not use the plane for political purposes. That's what politicians do."

This small bit of honesty is rather refreshing. Why not examine everybody's use of the planes, Including the outgoing speaker of the house.

Oh yeah, unlike Nancy Pelosi that rides a US Air Force 757 equivalent back and forth to San Francisco, with assorted security, limos, parties, bigger office space, etc. Yes, unlike an executive jet that seats 12, you can take a 757 weekly on Nancy's plane with her Staffer, which BTW crams 200+ American Serfs/Peons into the same plane. Hey... News Flash, It's all of them~!

Greed, Power, Control, has no party lines... stop the BS BIASED cover stories. If you want to cover some exclusive flights with jets, how about showing the nice laws craved out for Congress members and ANY politicians to fly to Israel, a FOREIGN country or corporate lobbyist revolving doors at the White House.

Such nonsense on these biased liberal articles that always play the games of the false dichotomy of the duopoly. Oh, never dare they show what their very own progressives do in abusing these perks, even more that the other half. Zombie liberal radicals just won't ever learn the game plans of politics... same for the other side Neocon radicals... IT'S ALWAYS THE OTHER PARTY, RIGHT?

You're all fools for buying into this left/right paradigm which are the radical extremists in America today. We in the center, just want to be left alone, like the US Constitution enforces.

Wow the libs must really be afraid of this guy, the attcks have already begun.........don't worry libs your guy "the dude" will get re-elected as soon as he figures out how to get 350000 jobs a month for 12 consecutive months and get the unemployment to just below 8%.

What's that you say the corporations aren't hiring?..............well don't worry the dude will fix it and get reelected............

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour has a strategy for beating Sarah Palin to the teabaggers' support in the 2012 primaries. Digby calls it his "Southern Strategy," consisting of a the dogwhistle message that "racism in America was always overblown with the implication being that those who complain about it have always been whiners."

That includes telling The Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson that the White Supremacist Citizens' Council was actually a force for good in the Civil Rights fight.

Both Mr. Mott and Mr. Kelly had told me that Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence. I asked Haley Barbour why he thought that was so.

“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”

That would be news to the African American citizens of Yazoo City. Via Atrios, here's a 1956 article from David Halberstam.

"Look,” said Nick Roberts of the Yazoo City Citizens Council, explaining why 51 of 53 Negroes who had signed an integration petition withdrew their names, “if a man works for you, and you believe in something, and that man is working against it and undermining it, why you don’t want him working for you—of course you don’t.”

In Yazoo City, in August 1955, the Council members fired signers of the integration petition, or prevailed upon other white employers to get them fired. But the WCC continues to deny that it uses economic force: all the Council did in Yazoo City was to provide information (a full-page ad in the local weekly listing the “offenders”); spontaneous public feeling did the rest.

Intimidating blacks and their white employers and supporters seems to have been the real business of the Yazoo City Citizens' Council. Yglesias has more, from a history of the era.

Predictably, the boycott as an instrument of repression found most effective employment in a cotton center such as Yazoo City, Mississippi, the self-styled "Gateway to the Delta." The local Citizens' Council there was one of the state's oldest and largest, and as the Yazoo City Herald boasted, "from the very first this community's outstanding citizens have been members." In a town of only 11,000 people the organization had grown from only 16 to nearly 1,500 by September, 1955. With such numbers, it was well prepared to meet the challenge of fifty-three signatures on a desegregation petition. In a full-page advertisement in the Herald, the Council published "an authentic list of the purported signers" of an NAACP petition. This list was also printed on large cardboard placards which were displayed in many of the community's stores, the bank, and even in cotton fields surrounding the city. As had happened elsewhere, economic sanctions followed and within a matter of weeks the petitioners' ranks were reduced to half a dozen. Again local Council leaders attributed the rash of reprisals to the "spontaneous reaction of public opinion." Whatever the reason, a disapproving northern newspaper could observe with little exaggeration that, "with the awful spectre of Yazoo City before them, few Mississippi Negroes would sign a desegregation petition today."

Wow is all I can say. Our Governor Mark Sanford did use state travel to make it on time to an appt for a haircut, and that did offend a lot of people, mainly Democrats. I hardly think that Haley Barbour is ever going to be President, whats with his penchant to whitewash history, but now it seems as if he belongs to the "Let them eat cake" crowd, also. Not a warm and fuzzy profile for those of us waking up deeper in debt after a Christmas of trying to put a turkey on the table and a couple of presents under the tree.